Friday, November 24, 2017

NB: The Iranian theocracy is an outstanding example of the numerous criminal regimes in the global polity. Only a sustained campaign of democratic persons can stop the increasing criminalisation of state structures, whether founded upon this or that religion; or whether they claim to be secular. Every country in South Asia is also witness to such criminalisation. International democratic solidarity across religious of political divisions is the need of the hour. DS

Some 75 Nobel
prizewinners have called on the Iranian government to release Ahmadreza
Djalali, a researcher in disaster medicine who was sentenced to death last
month. The letter is the latest and most powerful protest against the ruling by
the scientific community so far. The group wrote to
Gholamali Khoshroo, the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, on 17
November, and the letter was made public on 21 November. The Nobel laureates
express their concern for the conditions of Djalali’s detention; they deem his
trial “unfair” and “flawed”, and they urge the Iranian authorities to let him
return to Sweden, where he lived.

The list includes
prominent names such as Harold Varmus, a former director of the US National
Institutes of Health, now at the Weill Cornell Medicine institute in New York,
and Andre Geim, a physicist based at the University of Manchester, UK. They
wrote: “As members of a group of people and organizations who, according to the
will of Alfred Nobel are deeply committed to the greatest benefit to mankind,
we cannot stay silent, when the life and work of a similarly devoted researcher
as Iranian disaster medicine scholar Ahmadreza Djalali is threatened by a death
sentence.”

Djalali carried out
research on emergency medicine - specifically, on the response of hospitals to
terrorist attacks - while based at the University of Eastern Piedmont in Novara,
Italy, and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He was arrested in
Tehran in April 2016 and accused of collaboration with a hostile government. On
21 October this year, Djalali was convicted of espionage and sentenced to
death, according to Djalali’s wife Vida Mehrannia and Italian diplomatic
sources.

Tehran’s prosecutor
linked Djalali to the murder of several Iranian nuclear physicists. But a
document thought to have been written by Djalali has claimed that he was
sentenced after refusing to spy for Iran. Djalali’s lawyer has appealed against
the death sentence and is awaiting the court’s decision.

Since the death
sentence became public, many organisations have protested against Djalali’s
treatment. They include: Amnesty International, the human rights group;
senators in the Italian government; the directors of the European institutions
at which Djalali worked; and academic groups including the Committee of
Concerned Scientists and Scholars at Risk.